Market research & product concept sprint (Week 2)

In our first meeting this week, we discussed what was our target audience for SOM/SAM/TOM and what kind of data we needed to do look for to figure out our market size. We thought everything made sense until we actually started calculating. We noticed the unbalanced gap between our different target audience. For example, while our SAM was specifically targeted to junior illustrators, our TOM suddenly became creatives, which was too broad and ambiguous. We all needed to agree on what exact fields of artists/designers we were serving. We discussed and changed our target audience several time before we actually finalized our numbers.

After developing our direction and big idea, we divided our work so each person was responsible for their parts. My part was to synthesize our interview results. Compare to last week, I felt that the process become faster and clearer. I think the key is simple — not overthinking it. I used to spend a lot of time to categorize those post-it because I thought everything was connected. But now I will try to force myself to get rid of less important details and think in a bigger picture.

After our presentation, I realized our working method — assign a specific topic to each team member, was efficient but sometime made us too focus on ourselves and neglected others’ materials. For next time, I hope I can truly familiar with others’ part so we can help each out during presentation and answer questions from audience together.

During our concept sprint, we reached agreement on our persona and product direction easily. The only challenge we faced was to pick what features were essential for us. We tended to brainstorm a lot and sometimes our thoughts and spoken words weren’t organize enough for rest of the teammates to understand. I think we all have really great ideas, but what we need to work on is to train ourselves to deliver our ideas clearly.

The creative founder class provides me a great opportunity to actually experience what it is like to work in teams. Before this class, I haven’t have a chance to work in groups to develop a design project from the beginning to the end in such a long period of time. Rather than focusing on what kind of product we will end up with, what truly matters to me is our collaboration process. I think it is the mindset that actually leads us to develop our product concept — a safe space where artists and designers can share their work, inspire and support each other to encourage creative collaborations.